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NEW YORK (AP) — Four people arrested at an anti-war march during the 2004 Republican National Convention have been awarded $185,000 in the first trial stemming from lawsuits over protest arrests surrounding the GOP gathering.

Coming about six months after the city reached an $18 million settlement with about 1,800 other RNC protesters, Wednesday's federal jury verdict caps a lingering chapter in the legal saga that followed the arrests, nearly all of which ended with cases dismissed or defendants acquitted.

The four plaintiffs in the trial had rejected the settlement. Jurors awarded each $40,000 in compensatory damages for being wrongfully arrested, more than what individual protesters got in the settlement, which included about $7 million in attorneys' fees. The jury also awarded a total of $25,000 in punitive damages against police Deputy Chief Thomas Monahan, who led the response to the march.

Still, "this is not about money. It's about stopping police abuses in squashing First Amendment rights," one of the protesters, Howard J. Gale of Seattle, said Friday.

City lawyers said they were disappointed by the punitive damages.

"The officers were faced with a very difficult policing situation and only made arrests once they realized that such a large and unpermitted march could not proceed safely," Peter Farrell, a city attorney, said in a statement Friday.

The president of Monahan's union, the NYPD Captains Endowment Association, said the award "is misguided and sends a chilling message to police commanders."

"Chief Monahan acted that day consistent with his training and direction" and NYPD attorneys' advice, union President Roy T. Richter said.

The arrests unfolded at various points during the convention. But the trial concerned only an Aug. 31, 2004, march against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A judge found in 2012 that more than 225 marchers were arrested without probable cause, so jurors weighed only how much to award Gale, fellow demonstrators Steven Ekberg and Robert Siegel, and march legal observer Andrew St. Laurent.

As the procession began in lower Manhattan, police initially seemed to guide the demonstrators but then abruptly announced that they were blocking a sidewalk and would be arrested if they didn't stop, U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan wrote in 2012. He said they actually weren't all obstructing traffic, tried to comply with officers' instructions and didn't get a realistic chance to disperse before being arrested on disorderly conduct charges.

The four plaintiffs were held for 22 to 35 1/2 hours, said one of their attorneys, Martin Stolar.

Gale, a research psychologist and activist, said he wasn't looking for a confrontation with police when he went to the march, organized by the nonviolent War Resisters League.

"I wanted to do everything possible to avoid arrest," said Gale, 59.

City lawyers have noted that only a fraction of the 800,000 people who protested during the convention were arrested.

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Reach Jennifer Peltz on Twitter @ jennpeltz.

RINGWOOD, N.J. (AP) — A frightened bear cub got its head stuck in an oversized cookie jar while rummaging through some trash and had to be rescued from a tree in New Jersey.

Environmental Protection Department spokesman Larry Ragonese says the 6-month-old cub apparently found the animal crackers jar Friday night in Ringwood, near the New York border.

As the 28-pound animal tried to eat what remained in the jar, he apparently pulled it over his head and it got stuck.

The cub became spooked when approached and went up a tree, but got wedged about 40 feet up.

DEP staffers arranged netting in case the bear fell to the ground. After the animal was tranquilized by a DEP biologist, it was brought down and local firefighters gingerly cut the jar off its head.

Writer Walter Dean Myers died on Wednesday after a brief illness at age 76, leaving mourners in the adult world and young readers who saw themselves in his books. He expanded the face of publishing so that many children of color saw themselves reflected in his work.

Myers wrote more than 100 books, most of them in the genre of fiction for Young Adults (YA). Most of those dealt with the challenges of urban life for young black men, and the complicated moral minefield they have to negotiate to stay in one piece.

"A turning point for me was the discovery of a short story by James Baldwin about the black urban experience," Myers wrote. "It gave me permission to write about my own experiences. Somehow I always go back to the most turbulent periods of my own life. I write books for the troubled boy I once was."

Walter Milton Myers was born on Aug. 12, 1937, in Martinsburg, W. Va., but he didn't stay there long. His mother died in childbirth when he was a toddler, and his father George sent Walter and his brother Mickey to stay with a Harlem couple he knew, Florence and Herbert Dean. (Florence was George Myers' first wife. In tribute to the parents who raised him, Myers added Dean to his name.) The Deans raised the boys in a loving, protected environment, although young Walter often got tantalizing glimpses of the Harlem street life he wasn't allowed to investigate up close. He was already a rabid reader when he started school at Public School 125. He was one of those kids who was intelligent, but not academically inclined. And he got teased a lot for having a speech impediment.

Tall, thin and with that speech impediment, Myers was smart, angry and, as he told the Los Angeles Times in 1997, "always in trouble." (He didn't tolerate being teased for his stutter.) He hovered around the fringes of Harlem's young criminal life but it was reading that saved him.

"Reading pushed me to discover worlds beyond my landscape," he wrote on his website, "especially during dark times when my uncle was murdered and my family became dysfunctional with alcohol and grief."